Once I completed my animation I asked one of my peers to critique what I had done. This is what he had to say:

Positive

Consistent design

Good use of sound effects and music

Negative

Puppetry needs slight refining

Music should’ve been playing throughout the whole animation

Overall I am quite pleased to hear that my designs were consistent as this means that nothing was really out of place in terms of my creations. I find this to be a very helpful comment as many people who create animations professionally keep to a certain style all the way throughout their animations and knowing that I have done the same is a very good thing.

With regards to the negative comments, I am quite aware that my skills with the puppet tool definitely need refining in order to create a much more realistic sense of movement. However I wasn’t able to completely practice with the puppet tool much throughout the duration of the project due to me having to recreate assets when I changed my whole idea of how I wanted the animation to look. Not having music playing throughout the whole duration of the animation was also intentional as I felt that the other sound effects could not be heard clearly enough because of the music in the background.

For this project, we were required to make an animation to advertise Warburtons new Thin Bagels. This meant that we had to follow a series of necessary steps in order for us to be as free as possible in terms of the direction we would want to the animation to go.

To start the project, I needed to do research on several different things. Branding was one of the first things we were required to research as ultimately, this was an animation that is meant to advertise a company’s product. During this task I managed to gain a better grasp about how brands can affect sales of a certain product. I feel that doing research is very important as it can help you understand what to look for when having to market a product to possible consumers. For example, Warburtons values the whole idea of Family so incorporating this into an advert would be very wise.

I then started to research different types of animations in order for me to get a general idea of the direction I wanted to go in. I ultimately decided to just do a 2D animation that would be done using a combination of Photoshop and Adobe After Effects. The idea of making an animation in this way appealed to me more so than a stop motion as I felt that it would be way more time consuming due to the way stop motions are made. As well as this, I wasn’t really up for having to draw up and cut out scenes and characters due to my lack of artistic skill and ultimately I was just more comfortable making it on a computer in general.

Following on from this, we were put into groups to discuss different ideas for the animation. During this time we started thinking about possible characters, subject matters and the overall plot of the animation. During the group discussion, many ideas were thrown around but ultimately we settled on doing an animation with infidelity being a main part of the plot. This decision was made when my group started going over the different things that could be associated when looking at the thin bagel’s target demographic. Despite the idea being somewhat controversial, we decided to stick through it as the ending of the animation would have the 3 characters in the animation all enjoying eating Warburtons thin bagels even after the events that happened prior. As a group we also decided to portray everyone in the animation as bagels mainly because we had to make an animation based on thin bagels and also because it was a nice way of making possibly memorable characters. It was at this point when we started creating individual storyboards whilst also keeping the same plot.

With my storyboard complete, we were then tasked to make an animatic to roughly show how the animation would look like at its end stages. In order to do this, I had to scan through my storyboard and recreate/refine each frame so that it would be suitable to be created into an animatic. Once the images were refined, I then uploaded these images to Adobe After Effects so that I could start animating them in a very simple way.

I then had to start developing my 3 characters and the overall setting of the whole animation. Initially, I decided on making a lot of things within the animation ‘bagel themed’ in the hopes of creating a somewhat unique looking, fictional version of Bolton. This ultimately did not come into fruition mainly due to the fact that as I progressed further into actually making all the assets on computer, it started becoming harder to differentiate items and scenes because I was so fixated on making everything bagel themed. This led me to just recreate my scenes entirely so that it could better suit the way in which I wanted my animation to look overall. With regards to my 3 characters (Mrs. Bagel, Mr. Bagel and the unnamed thin bagel), I wanted to make sure that all of them were somewhat unique in a way so that they could be fairly distinguishable.

When it came to actually making the animation, I decided to use Adobe After Effects to create it as throughout the course we ended up using it for smaller projects and because of this, I was fairly confident with using the software. I mostly used classic key framing to move aspects of characters and assets that I cut in Adobe Photoshop throughout the animation which was fairly straight forward as I had already used most of the features when creating the animatic. I also used the puppet tool within my animation so I could animate the character’s limbs and other things that required smoother movement.

With regards to my assets and scenes, I feel that overall they are adequate but I could make improvements such as making edges cleaner and adding more detail within scenes. I also noticed that when it came to actually adding the assets onto After Effects, I sort of messed up some of the layers within the Photoshop files as I merged a lot of the layers together which ultimately limited the my characters movements around the scenes. I would’ve also liked to have refined the sounds that I added to the animation as I feel that they are slightly mistimed but to be completely honest, I’m just happy that I was actually able to add music and sound effects to my animation as it gives it a more ‘complete’ feel.

Overall I am quite content with my end product even though realistically, at the current stage it’s at with the storyline, it would never be made into an advert due to it being slightly too inappropriate. Honestly, I didn’t have too much of a problem with the viability of my animation as whilst I was making the animation, I was able to pick up new skills which I can now implement into future projects to make them look and feel more professional.

Here I have created the scenes which I sketched in my book. I found sketching my scenes before actually creating them on Photoshop to be very useful as I knew where everything was going to be placed and I could adjust my layers according to that. As these are only the backgrounds of each scene, I have avoided adding characters that would be animated.

When creating Mrs. Bagel I thought about certain reasons as to why Mr Bagel would want to cheat on her. The simplest way to make her somewhat unappealing was to make her seem old and making her hair grey was the easiest way of representing age.

Creating Mr Bagel was fairly simple as I just went with a typical ‘9 to 5 drone’ type look. One of the more noticable feature however is his eyes. I went with this particular style for his eyes because I wanted him to have a sort of lifeless feel to him.

For the Thin Bagel I went with a more innocent look which is why I went with a ponytail. The ponytail may also represent a certain level of youth which is what I was trying to achieve because the thin bagel is slightly younger than Mr and Mrs Bagel.

Within my group of 3 we each started to draw anything with bagels on it just to get a few ideas bouncing around. These drawings became very useful in trying to piece together possible characters designs and even the story line to an extent.